2025Marc Dür, Samuel Luterbacher
- Videos
- 5
- Creators
- 5
1 - 4 players120 - 180 minHeavy weight

2023Marc Dür, Samuel Luterbacher
Mainly reviews. Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game is covered on BoardGameVideo.com by 15 reviews, 4 how-to-play guides, 1 recorded sessions, 3 unboxings, and 2 other videos.
From BoardGameGeek
Have you ever dreamed of building and managing your own zoo? Well now you can with Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game! Build a zoo that focuses on marquee animals like Lions, Gorillas, or Elephants to attract and thrill guests. Or develop partnerships with National Parks on conservation and re-introduce endangered species back into the wild. Strategically place food booths and gift shops to satiate guests, while generating revenue to help keep your zoo growing and thriving. The more money you generate, the more options you have at your disposal to create the zoo of your dreams! With 35 different species (most of them represented by 230 animal meeples), you have an abundance of options from which to select your favorite animals. But selecting animals is only the beginning! Just like in real life, each amazing animal will require unique care to meet their individual needs. Carefully balance group and enclosure sizes, social composition, and guest proximity, to try and achieve the right balance between animal and guest happiness. Happiness will play a particularly important role in animal reproduction, and new animal options for addition to your zoo. Play your cards right, and you may find your animals having offspring! This is important for conservation projects but also a great source of popularity. However, it must not be forgotten that a place must be available once they get older. With our “zoo in a box” – watch the zoo of your dreams come true, right in front of you! In Zoo Tycoon the board game, players compete to build the most successful zoo. In this strategic and thematic board game, each player has the freedom to develop their own zoo with 35 species, food booths, zoo shops, etc. Each animal has its own care requirements focused on 3 key areas - popularity for visitors, educational value, and nature conservation. Thanks to a novel game mechanism, the animal market with supply and demand changes continuously. In addition, small events will shape the gameplay in every round. As with zoos in real life, players must find the right balance between popularity and conservation over the course of the game. In the end, the lower value between those two measurements will count as your final score. -description from the publisher
Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game has 25 videos from 22 creators: 15 reviews, 4 how-to-play guides, 1 playthrough, 3 unboxings and 2 other videos. They date from 2022 to April 2026.
To learn the rules, start with "Learn to Play: Zoo Tycoon The Board Game" by Learn to Play Games, which runs 1 h 7 min.
For an opinion before you buy, start with "Zoo Tycoon - Board Game Review - Animal Happiness Simulator" by The Broken Meeple. 14 creators have reviewed it. To see it played, watch "Zoo Tycoon The Board Game - solo playthrough" by Blue Dog Board Games.
If you like it, try Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game – New Shores and Darwin's Choice, also by Marc Dür, or The Palaces of Carrara (Second Edition) and The One Hundred Torii, which share several of its mechanics.
8 of 22
2025Marc Dür, Samuel Luterbacher
1 - 4 players120 - 180 minHeavy weight
2019Marc Dür, Samuel Luterbacher, Elio Reinschmidt
2 - 6 players60 - 120 minMedium weight
2022Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer
2 - 4 players60 - 90 minMedium weight
2020Scott Caputo
1 - 4 players45 - 60 minMedium weight
From BoardGameGeek:
Have you ever dreamed of building and managing your own zoo? Well now you can with Zoo Tycoon: The Board Game! Build a zoo that focuses on marquee animals like Lions, Gorillas, or Elephants to attract and thrill guests. Or develop partnerships with National Parks on conservation and re-introduce endangered species back into the wild. Strategically place food booths and gift shops to satiate guests, while generating revenue to help keep your zoo growing and thriving. The more money you generate, the more options you have at your disposal to create the zoo of your dreams! With 35 different species (most of them represented by 230 animal meeples), you have an abundance of options from which to select your favorite animals. But selecting animals is only the beginning! Just like in real life, each amazing animal will require unique care to meet their individual needs. Carefully balance group and enclosure sizes, social composition, and guest proximity, to try and achieve the right balance between animal and guest happiness. Happiness will play a particularly important role in animal reproduction, and new animal options for addition to your zoo. Play your cards right, and you may find your animals having offspring! This is important for conservation projects but also a great source of popularity. However, it must not be forgotten that a place must be available once they get older. With our “zoo in a box” – watch the zoo of your dreams come true, right in front of you! In Zoo Tycoon the board game, players compete to build the most successful zoo. In this strategic and thematic board game, each player has the freedom to develop their own zoo with 35 species, food booths, zoo shops, etc. Each animal has its own care requirements focused on 3 key areas - popularity for visitors, educational value, and nature conservation. Thanks to a novel game mechanism, the animal market with supply and demand changes continuously. In addition, small events will shape the gameplay in every round. As with zoos in real life, players must find the right balance between popularity and conservation over the course of the game. In the end, the lower value between those two measurements will count as your final score. -description from the publisher
Designers
Marc Dür, Samuel Luterbacher
Artists
Rozenn Grosjean, Matthieu Martin, Nina Pommelin, Victor Sales, Johanna Tarkela
Publisher
Treecer (Treeceratops)
Mechanics